It has become a bit of a cliché: really innovative technology comes from garage-level startups. Once a company gets too large, it focuses its energy on keeping its existing customers happy, and loses its edge. But, for the most part, the technology we rely on for getting things done—providing the hardware and networking infrastructure, for example—comes from mature, profitable companies. So, we thought it might be interesting to take a step back and look at what tech companies are among the most successful at marketing products and services that are widely put to use.
Of course, any measure of "success" is inviting argument. Should it be profits, units sold, recent growth? We settled on two measures. The first is the market capitalization, which provides some sense of how the financial community views both a company's current fiscal strength and its potential for future growth. To provide some sense of how much of that is growth potential, we chose the price-to-earnings ratio as our other measure—the higher the number, the more the company's perceived growth potential factors into its market cap.
Defining tech
For starters, a couple of thoughts on companies we've chosen to leave out. One category that is extremely high-tech is the pharmaceutical industry. Either through in-house work or acquisitions, every major pharmaceutical company is now a biotech powerhouse, and relies on some really cutting edge approaches to generating products. Pharma companies are also huge. J&J, Roche, Pfizer, and Novartis are all within the top 30 (3 others are in the top 50), and would have made it onto our list, displacing more traditional tech companies.
Similarly, we're excluding telecommunications providers, even though some of them are equally huge. (China Mobile sits right behind Apple, AT&T is ahead of Google, and Telefonica and Vodafone are in the top-50). They both integrate lots of high-tech products and enable the latest and greatest tech toys, but progress here has been pretty evolutionary of late, and it's hard to escape the sense that they're simply offering pipes for others to send innovation through.
